A sequential straight line through the middle of everything, leading nowhere.

Do not seek this word, gentle reader, in your dictionary of choice. It will not be there. This is a recent example of what Walter Skeat called ghost words. It was coined by John Ciardi, the American poet, in A Browser’s Dictionary in 1980. The genesis of his creation was the sequence klmnop from the centre of the alphabet, with ten letters before and ten after it, which Mr Ciardi described as “a strictly sequential irrelevance�?.